Difficulties Faced by Urdu-Medium Students of English at Graduation Level: An Outline for the Report

1. Introduction At school level, the educational system of Pakistan is divided into three major categories on the basis of the medium of instruction: 1. The government vernacular-medium schools which use Urdu, and the regional languages as Sindhi, Balochi, Punjabi, Pashto, etc as their medium of instruction for teaching almost all the subjects. 2. English medium schools (private elitist; state-influenced public schools and cadet colleges; and non-elitist private English-medium schools) which teach all subjects in English except Islamiat and Urdu compulsory. 3. Religious seminaries (madreassas of the two major sects of Islam Sunni and Shia) which mostly uses vernaculars for teaching.1 However, at higher education level (colleges and universities), there is only one medium of instruction: that is English. Thus there are two streams of students entering from the schools into our higher education institutions: a. Students from Urdu- or vernacular-medium background b. Students from English-medium background2. As far as English medium students are concerned, they do not feel much difficulty in coping with the environment as well as the advance study; whereas, the vernacular-medium students face a lot of problems in competing them: ➢ These students cannot comprehend the lectures and books which are mostly in English ➢ They have to face so many hurdles in explaining their points of view due to the lack of verbal competency. ➢ Their academic results suffer a lot as they usually secure low grades due to their inability to write proper English sentences. ➢ Their difficulties in English language result in their failure in the particular subject. And since English is a compulsory subject, failure in English means failure in the entire University examination.3 ➢ Due to poor academic results and failure, these students suffer from financial and economical problems as

References: 1- A.P.R. Howatt. A History of English Language Teaching. (Oxford University Press, 1984) 2- Faiza Amin Mohammed Khalil 3- James Coady, Thomas N. Huckin. Second Language vocabulary acquisition: a rationale for pedagogy. (Cambridge University Press, New York, 1997)  4- M 5- N. S. Ahmed. 1964. Teaching of English as a Second Language. (The Carwan Book House, Lahore, Pakistan) 6- Riaz Hassan, 2004 7- Steven McDonough, 1986. Psychology in Foreign Language Teaching. (George Allen & Unwin, London) 8- Tariq Rahman 9- Tariq Rahman, Language, Ideology and Power: Language -Learning Among the Muslims of Pakistan and North India, (Oxford University Press, Karachi, 2002) 10- W.M